Wednesday, January 28, 2015

MacCube

I have bought a 2nd hand MacCube. I was hoping that it would work, but I guess that I bought it already broken. I tried for a while to make it work as it was just to discover that most of the components inside were mechanically damaged (broken hdd connectors, ram slots, ...). I repaired and repaired but finally I gave up.

So I bought again a 2nd hand Asus AT5NM10I mini itx motherboard, some RAM and USB Bluetooth and WiFi adapters. I have also bought a pico PSU from aliexpress.
I have 'dremeled' the case o be able to accomodate the motherboard - I had to create some 2mm channels/slots in the case metal in order to accept the motherboard.

I have tried to reuse as may of the original components as I could (touch sensor, back side buttons).

Finally I was able to boot it and installed Lion (the last one I knew that could be hacked to support Atom).

I installed Enoch bootloader. Audio worked with VoodooHDA. Video is unaccelerated (the 3150 is not supported on OS-X).

I am using it for the moment as a streaming audio device.

I am proud of owning this as the main reason for buying it that it is considered a work of art - one Cube being displayed at MOMA in New York.